Talkdesk Gets $230 Million in New Funding, Hires Sumo Logic Vet as CFO

Talkdesk has raised $230 million in new series D funding and hired Sydney Carey, previously with Sumo Logic, as its new chief financial officer (CFO).

Talkdesk is now valued at more than $10 billion. That places it among the most highly valued private companies in the SaaS or enterprise software industry.

The Talkdesk funding came from new investors Whale Rock Capital Management, TI Platform Management and Alpha Square Group. Existing investors Amity Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Top Tier Capital Partners, Viking Global Investors and Willoughby Capital also contributed.

In total, Talkdesk has now raised $498 million in funding since its inception.

Partnership Growth

In the past year, Talkdesk has expanded its ecosystem of resellers, cloud distributors, strategic alliances and AppConnect marketplace partnerships to more than 300 contracted partners and thousands of subagents, Carey said.

Talkdesk’s Sydney Carey

“At the same time, we’ve introduced more than 30 new product innovations,” she said. “We’re on a quest to revolutionize the contact center market and automate 80% of customer interactions. We’re also lowering the barrier for artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in the contact center. We currently have 1,000 engineers – the most in the industry – working on solutions, and 50% of our investment goes into R&D. The new funding will further support those efforts and ultimately allow us to bring even more innovations to market, which will enable our partners to provide more compelling solutions to their customers.”

Innovation is a Talkdesk hallmark, Carey said.

“We will use the new funding to continue to innovate at a speed unmatched by other vendors in the industry,” she said. “Partners in this market want to work with cloud contact center providers who are constantly at the top of their game delivering the best customer experience solutions and who have a global demand for their offers. We have both. It is a privilege to partner with these resellers to help get Talkdesk CX Cloud quickly into the hands of enterprises around the world.”

Female Leadership

Carey previously was Sumo Logic‘s CFO. Before that, she was CFO of Duo Security, which was acquired by Cisco in 2018.

“I joined Talkdesk because of the incredible opportunity to be part of a company massively disrupting an old market — the contact center space,” she said. ” … I have a passion for working with high-growth SaaS companies, and Talkdesk absolutely met that criteria. When I met Tiago Paiva, our CEO, I was excited by his vision, as well as the experience and passion of the entire executive team. Also, being part of an executive team that is 50% female is rare in tech. So it is rewarding to be part of yet another historic moment Talkdesk is setting not just for the company, but for the whole industry.”

With strong leadership in place, Talkdesk will be “moving fast across geographies to meet companies where they need us,” Carey said.

“We’re also continuing to deepen and expand the Talkdesk partner ecosystem, marking new milestones in transforming our go-to-market strategy through cloud distributors, resellers, strategic alliances and AppConnect marketplace,” she said. “As part of that strategy, we’re working to help our partners uncover new opportunities, particularly in vertical industries and to broaden their offerings with more innovative solutions that leverage the power of AI and automation.”